The man who most clearly enunciated this
ideal of democratic education at Rutgers was Mason Gross, the
president who had guided Rutgers' transition from private to
public status in the 1950s. A philosopher who studied with Alfred
North Whitehead at Jesus College, Cambridge,
he came from a patrician family. He'd been educated at a series
of private institutionsthe Taft School, Jesus College,
Harvard. Against the clamor for open admissions during the 1960s,
Gross firmly maintained that only high academic and intellectual
standards were consistent with a true ideal of democratic education.
For all his patrician background, however, Gross struck people
as having been born for the new world of ethnic and educational
diversity that emerged during the Sixties. He came out of that
contentious period, when the struggle over civil rights and the
Vietnam War turned American campuses into battlegrounds, as one
of the most popular figures in the state. As I'd hear again and
again when talking to alumni who knew him personally, his popularity
was due to moral character.

All through the campus demonstrations of
the Sixties, for instance, Gross made clear that his sympathies
were solidly with the students who were going South to break
down the system of racial segregation, and later with those who
were opposing the Vietnam War. Yet he did so without alienating
New Jersey citizens whose views on these issues opposed his own.
When Gross took a stand, people sensed that, whether or not they
agreed with him, his conclusions were the honest product of deep
moral reflection. Throughout his years as president of Rutgers,
he taught at least one undergraduate class a term. Stories abounded
about important visitors being kept waiting for Gross the president
while Gross the philosopher finished debating a point in Plato
or Spinoza with one of his students. When he stepped down from
the Rutgers presidency, the New Jersey Democratic party begged
him to run as a candidate for governor. Polls indicated he would
have won by a mile.

Nonetheless, in reading the speeches given
by Mason Gross during his presidency, one sees that the transition
from private to public university had begun to put a severe strain
on his ideal of democratic education. President Gross was clearly
and uncomfortably aware of a mounting pressure to move Rutgers
in the direction of big-time college athletics. Nor was the pressure
coming mainly from alumni athletics boosters. As alumni who attended
Rutgers in the Gross era would later tell me, much of the pressure
was coming from New Jersey politicians and local businessmen.
When I thought back to my UNM years, this made perfect sense.
In Albuquerque, the Lobo boosters club had been dominated by
local beer distributors and building contractors and car dealers.
Many of these men had not graduated from UNM. A good percentage
of them had never gone to college. But all of them got a sense
of enhanced personal importance from having a connection to Norm
Ellenberger's Lobo basketball program. In New Jersey, the pressure
for big-time athletics was coming from the same types, except
here they worked for companies like Prudential Life instead of
Coors Beer. One group of Prudential employees would later emerge
as prominent members of "Scarlet R," the Rutgers athletics
booster club.

The best expression of Mason Gross's response
to outside pressure is an address on college athletics policy
included in his collected speeches. At its center is an ideal
of participatory athletics that seems today to have come from
another world. For Gross himself had been a college athlete,
a member of the Jesus College crew all during his undergraduate
career. "I rowed throughout my four years," he told
his audience, "in singles, pairs, fours, and eights, six
days a week the year round, in intercollegiate competition and
at regattas all over England. It was for me a tremendously exciting
and important part of those undergraduate years." It's true,
Gross admits, that Cambridge athletics had none of the elaborate
machinery that had come to dominate Div IA sports in America
even by the time he was delivering this speech in 1960. The English
universities were without professional coaches, recruiting, or
athletic scholarships. Still, he and his classmates had found
competition supremely worthwhile. In later life, Gross remained
steadfastly loyal to this ideal of a broad-based and genuinely
participatory college athletics. Throughout his years at Rutgers,
he would donate his public speaking fees to the underfunded Rutgers
crew.

In stressing genuinely amateur athletics
for his students, Gross was leading from Rutgers' strength as
an old university. For though sports had long been part of its
institutional lifethe first college football game in America
was played between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869its traditional
opponents over the next hundred years would be the schools that
today make up the Ivy and Patriot Leagues: Columbia, Colgate,
Princeton, Lafayette, Bucknell, Lehigh, Yale, and Brown, along
with the military academies at West Point and Annapolis. All
were schools that did not give out athletic scholarships, and
so had been able to resist the degradations of commercialized
sports in the late twentieth century. In this sense, Gross's
address on athletics policy reads like a gentle but firm reminder
that Rutgers had belonged to a world where college sports were
played by real students at the collegeundergraduates who
went out for the football or basketball team in the same spirit
as others of their classmates went out for the Targum, the student
newspaper, or the Glee Club or orchestra or a college production
of Othello or A Midsummer Night's Dream.

W.C. Dowling, Confessions
of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption
at an Old Eastern University (Penn State UP, 2005).